A few weeks ago, the 100th anniversary of author Fritz Leiber's birth passed largely unnoticed. The literary community offered up no tributes. No celebrations or symposiums were held. Perhaps that should come aslittle surprise. None of Leiber's books are in stock at mylocal chain bookstores, and most of his writing is out ofprint. Yet few authors of the 20th century anticipated the storytelling of the current day with more prescience than Leiber, who passed away in 1992 at age 81.

A wide range of recent novels—from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books to Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen ofthe Road—reflect Leiber’s clear, direct influence, whileother era-defining literary series, from Harry Potter to Twi-light, draw on the same mystical-meets-the-everydayrecipe that Leiber mastered decadesago. The term magical realism didn'texist back in the 1930s and 1940s,but Leiber could very well have trade-marked it long before the Latin Ameri-can literary lions turned it into a NobelPrize-winning style. But Leiber’simpact is perhaps even more evidentwhen one leaves behind prose fiction,and instead looks at other contempo-rary vehicles for storytelling: movies,graphic novels, video games, role-playing games, and other ways inwhich tales come to life in the modernday. When I was a freshman in college,my roommate devoted innumerable hours to Dungeonsand Dragons, a pioneering open-ended game with clear borrowings from Leiber, just as today, my youngest son spends hours immersed in an on-line multiplayer gamethat bears uncanny similarities to Leiber’s adventurestories. Many of us, it seems, live in a Leiberian universe—or at least escape there in our free time.

Fritz Leiber’s life story was almost as strange and wondrous as those he concoted for his books. At one point or anotherin his life he was a movie actor (you can see Fritz Leiber working with Greta Garbo in Camille), chess champion,board game inventor, comic strip writer (for the Buck Rogers series), editor of an encyclopedia, minister, student of psychology, student of philosophy, student of theology,writing teacher, Shakespearian stage actor, inspector forthe aerospace industry, skilled fencer, speech instructor (at Occidental College in Los Angeles) and, of course, science fiction and fantasy author. Despite these considerabletalents, Leiber spent his final years in humble surroundings, residing in a one-room apartment in San Francisco’s tenderloin district. Harlan Ellison has described Leiberwriting his stories on a manual typewriter propped over the sink in his cramped quarters.

Leiber drew on his odd hodgepodge of skills and personal experiences in crafting his stories. His considerable skillsas a chessplayer—Leiber won the Santa Monica open in 1958—are reflected in a number of tales, perhaps most notably in “The 64 Square Madhouse,” which presentsthe extraordinary concept (at least back in 1964, when itwas published) of a computer entering a chess tournament. Leiber’s deep knowledge of Shakespeare—he played Malcolm in Macbeth and Edgar in King Lear—shows upin countless stories, for example “No Great Magic” which features an acting troupe that, through the wonders of time travel, performs Macbeth for Queen Elizabeth I and theBard of Avon himself. Leiber’s brief stint as a minister is reflected in the religious themes of various tales—hecredited it as an aid in writing Gather Darkness, althoughhis teachers at the General Theological Seminary wouldnot have been pleased with the practitioners of witchcraft serving as heroes and the priests playing villains in thisnovel. And, of course, Leiber’s talents as a fencer areechoed again and again in his adventure stories, especially those featuring Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, the formercharacter modeled after the author himself.

“There’s a lot in a name,” Leiber once noted. And his gave him no end of troubles. “I’m forever having to explained,” he griped, “that it’s pronounced LYber not LEEber, and correspondingly spelled Leiber not Lieber.” His first namewas equally problematic. “Fritz” was used as a term of derision applied to German soldiers in World War I, and the future author found teachers and friends who refused toaccept that any patriotic American citizen would go by sucha despised name. Yet Leiber was more American thanmost of his detractors—his paternal grandfather, a German immigrant, had fought as a Captain on the Union side in the Civil War, and his mother’s American roots could be traced back to the Revolution.

The future author was named after his father, Fritz Leiber,Sr., an itinerant actor of some renown, who early recruitedhis son into the thespian arts. Leiber Jr. devoted years to stage drama, and also tried his hand at a Hollywood career. Like so many of Leiber’s early initiatives, these efforts didnot go very far, but held him in good stead in later life. Leiber’s stage presence, rhetorical skills and stature—hewas 6’ 4” —made him a standout figure at science fiction conventions and other gatherings where he had the prepossessing impact in person that many authors can only achieve on the printed page.

Another career stepping-stone paved the way to Leiber’s debut as a published author. In a strange move for an apparent non-believer, Leiber entered the General Theo-logical Seminary in Manhattan and was soon operating asa minister and lay reader at nearby Episcopal churches. Leiber justified this move, despite his lack of deep faith, asa commitment to social work. "To an actor a priest is justone more role or part," he later wrote, "a particularly easyone since a priest is just a sort of actor who puts on showsin churches." But around this same time, Leiber began publishing children stories in The Churchman.

Leiber’s religious vocation was short-lived, but he con-tinued to write tales and submit them to various periodicals. Although his early interest gravitated to science fiction,Leiber decided that fantasy stories would be easier to write. With his story “Two Sought Adventure,” accepted by John Campbell and published in Unknown in August 1939,Leiber not only embarked on a new career as a pulp fiction author, but he also introduced thetwo most famous characters of hiscareer, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser,who would eventually appear inmore than three dozen tales writtenover a period of a half-century.

Leiber could not take credit forinventing these two adventurers. Instead, his friend Harry OttoFischer had first sketched themout in a letter to Leiber dating backto 1934. "For all do fear the onenamed the Gray Mouser,” Fischerhad written. “He walks with swagger‘mongst the bravos, though he’s butthe stature of a child." The Mouser, modeled on Fischer,was accompanied on his exploits and intrigues by Fafhrd,a dour but dangerous swordsman from the Cold Wastes ofthe North, some seven feet tall, who served as Leiber’s alter ego. Leiber took these hints and parlayed them into one of great adventure series of the century, the quintessential “swords and sorcery” saga, still unsurpassed so many decades later.

Leiber’s greatest gift may have been his ability to combinethe fanciful with the realistic. He aimed for this odd combination from the start of his career. In “Smoke Ghost,” published in Unknown in 1940 he created a modernizedspook story, with “a ghost from the world today, with the sootof the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery inits soul.” In “The Hound,” featured in Weird Tales in 1942,he followed the same line, evoking “supernatural beings of a modern city.” Most famously, in Conjure Wife—made three times into a movie, with a fourth on its way—Leiber situateda coven of witches in a modern university. Here the wives practice spells and charms, while their skeptical husbandsare unaware of the magic protecting and assailing themfrom all sides—a premise from which our author extractsmuch uproar and comedy.

A similar emphasis on "magical realism," infuses theFafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. The duo are depictedas vulnerable, fickle, and down-to-earth in a way that wasrare in the 1930s. This was, after all, an era of larger-than-life heroes. Superman had just made his debut a fewmonths earlier, and a host of other protagonists from the period—Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Captain Marvel, Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Lassie, Dick Tracy—all workedout, in their various ways, a simplistic good-versus-evil worldview, not much different than the matchup destinedto unfold on European battlefields a few weeks after the publication of the first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tale. Leiber would have none of this vanilla virtuousness, and in his adventure series he embraced the anti-hero ethos, breaking many of the most cherished rules of genre writing.

Readers raised on The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and other fantasy adventure tales will be especially surprised bythe bawdiness of Leiber’s oeuvre. “I dote on sex and scandal,” he once wrote, and these figured prominently inboth his storytelling and his life. In his early seventies,Leiber wrote a brief memoir, and filled much of it with the intimate details most scribes leave out of their autobiographies. "Here's one fantasy writer," he bragged, "who will try to give [readers] the straight dope." Sci-fiauthor Marc Laidlaw recalls his surprise when, at age 15,he sent a fan letter off the Leiber, who responded with a note scrawled on the back of a racy postcard which “tipped oneway then the other, showed a buxom cartoon woman alternately clothed and nude.”

The rewards of authorship were meager—during his prime writing years, Leiber held a day job, and found that hisfiction contributed only somewhere between a tenth to a fifthof his modest total income. But an even bigger challenge to his productivity as an author came from alcohol, with boththe drinking and struggle against it draining away energy hemight have devoted to literary work. At one point in the mid-1950s, Leiber experienced a four year dry spell as anauthor—which coincided with a period that was anythingbut a dry spell in his private life. But when he came backwith The Big Time, his finest science fiction novel andHugo winner from 1958, Leiber was stronger than ever—seemingly armed with a large number of fresh ideas thathad accumulated during his absence from the typewriter.

As I look upon the various jobs and hobbies that filled Fritz Leiber’s life, I am perhaps most struck by one that is not onthe list, and for which our author would have been perfectly suited—namely screenplay writer. I’m even more surprised that Fafhrd and Gray Mouser haven’t yet served as thebasis for a blockbuster motion picture series. In manyways, these characters are much more aligned with the sensibility of modern audiences than the more idealized figures that populate the fictive universes of Middle Earth,Star Wars and Narnia. And Leiber’s sly and witty dialogueis ready-made for transference from the written page to the silver screen. Leiber, recall, immersed himself in the worldof acting and drama long before he started writing stories,and his literary output shows his knack for setting the stage and striking the right rhetorical tone.

Leiber is remembered nowadays for his panache as a storyteller, but he also took far more care in the formalstructure of his works than did the majority of his contemporaries. From the start, he adopted tightconstraints for his works—for example borrowing EdgarRice Burroughs’ approach of moving two plots forward simultaneously in alternating chapters. In The Big Time,a time travel tale in which time stands still, he observes the three Aristotelian unities in a narrative so austere in its construction that it could be adapted to the stage with asingle set and small cast. But his most daring formalist experiment came with The Wanderer, winner of the 1965 Hugo Award for best novel. Here Leiber pursues 15 majorplot lines (as well as a few minor ones) in the course of a disaster novel that transpires over two days. The novelfollows a strict chronology, with no flashbacks, but changesits setting every few paragraphs. The closest analogy isDon DeLillo’s Underworld from 1997, but Leiber is evenmore extreme than DeLillo is imposing strict rules on his narrative. Science fiction fans of the current day have been too quick to dismiss this work, complaining about itsunwonted intricacy, which makes extreme demands on readers. Yet, by any measure, The Wanderer stands outas one of the most ambitious genre works of its era.

Of course, most science fiction fans of the current day willhave no opinion at all on this work—since they are blissfully unaware of Fritz Leiber. I note that, as I write, none of his books rank among the bestselling 50,000 titles atAmazon.com. Yet if modern-day audiences have morethan passing familiarity with today’s video games, or hitfilms, or have any experience of sword-and-sorcery talesor stories of wizardry, they have probably picked up second-hand or third-hand on Leiber’s legacy. Yet this is oneinstance in which they are advised to go straight to theoriginal source.

In truth, many of the icons of the Golden Age of pulp fiction have not aged well, their works as out-of-date as the T-Model Ford and wind-up Victrola. But Leiber’s best work comes across as fresh and modern to an almost uncanny degree. I will stop short of predicting that the same sort ofposthumous accolades that Philip K. Dick has enjoyed willnext be showered on Fritz Leiber. But few genres authorsare more worthy of a hard second look from today’s readers,and fewer still can pass the century mark and still have so much to say to contemporary audiences. For all Leiber's obsession with mixing real life with the magical and mystical, this may be his most impressive—and certainly his most lasting—trick.